Backrooms ― Turns out you can just make a movie about people walking around in liminal spaces

 

Poster credit: A24

 

I recently went to watch Backrooms, and was pleasantly surprised to find that a good chunk of the movie was just people wandering around a strange liminal space, with unsettling music playing, strange noises, and nothing much else happening. It was gripping.

The movie, directed by Kane Parsons and produced by A24, is inspired by a post on 4chan, which became really popular and inspired a lot of expansion about the idea, and that of liminal spaces in general, creating a whole internet community dedicated to expanding the idea of the backrooms.

Original 4chan Post

Kane Parson, otherwise known as Kane Pixels, made a YouTube series inspired by this post. Videos put together in Blender, showcasing people no-clipping (passing through the walls of reality) into the backrooms, and recording their experience. It eventually built up a wide range of lore, and the community heralded Kane's project as a defining product of the backrooms, with imagery from his series leaking into other adaptations ― including video-games. No surprise then that he was contacted by A24 to direct a film based on his adaptation of the post. A film that continues the lore of his series.

A point of contention about the backrooms itself is the idea of monsters. There's fierce fighting about whether monsters actually improve or worsen the concept. In the backrooms wiki community, with multiple layers and contributors, monsters are a dime a dozen. And many feel that they cheapen the concept. I've seen opinions that the part of the original post alluding to a monster is the worst part of said post.

Kane's series, and the movie, has monsters in it. Not many, though. And it seems he has picked a direction to take with the monsters, based on the movie. One that fits with the core idea of what the backrooms is in his series. That the place "remembers" things, but in a cyclical way, so the more it remembers, the less accurate those memories are. With that idea, you can try to image what the monster might be, I won't spoil.

I believe that is what is lacking with the ideas of the other backrooms monsters. They are monsters that might thematically fit the space, but have no reason for being there. Whereas Kane has made monsters that logically fit in the space, thus feeding into the concept instead of feeling like something tacked-on.

However, all of that is nothing compared to the core part of the idea, and film. That you are in this liminal space, and it's easy to get lost. The real feeling of dread you get in the film does not come from chase sequences, anyone can make good chase sequences. The dread comes from watching a character run around, getting hopelessly lost, and unable to backtrack because they are in a chase sequence. Thus, the monster serves to cut off the anchor line that any of us would assume we have in the situation: Our ability to find our way to an escape point.

So when we see characters wandering around, letting either their curiosity or fear guide them further in, we feel tension. It's an unsettling space. One that is so easy to get lost in that the crew of the film got lost within their own sets. The tension from that alone is enough to make for a highly compelling movie. 

The true horror of the backrooms is the idea that the more you try to find a way out, the more lost you become.